Deborah Miranda

Deborah A. Miranda is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California, with Santa Ynez Chumash ancestry. Her mixed-genre memoir Bad Indians received the PEN Okland-Josephine Miles Literary Award, won a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and was short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award. She is the author of four poetry collections: Altar for Broken Things, Raised by Humans, The Zen of La Llorona, and Indian Cartography, and coeditor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature. She earned her PhD in English literature from the University of Washington in Seattle and was Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she taught literature of the margins and creative writing. She retired from her professorship in 2021 to focus on scholarship and poetry involved California Mission history and literatures. She and her spouse, writer Margo Solod, live in Eugene, Oregon, a short distance from homelands in California.